I decided to take a few minutes and share my tutorial on how to add a watermark in Lightroom. This tutorial will follow my personal workflow, so you may not do it exactly like I’m doing it, but this should get you started.

If you don’t have a watermark, read this first. Stop at step 5. Go on. I’ll wait. And maybe take a little nap while I’m waiting.

Okay, so you have your watermark … make double triple sure that it’s on a transparent background!! Now, change the color of the watermark to white [#ffffff] and save it as a .psd file.

Download LR/Mogrify 2 (follow instructions here, including the installation of ImageMagick if you use Windows)

Here’s the kicker … the program developers do require a donation to use full features, BUT it’s worth it. They only require €2, but that’s like $3.08 in US dollars, and they deserve it for making life this much easier.

Also, my husband is a developer, and I know how much work goes into the programs he designs … I’m always willing to give back to the people who do this for a living.

Open Lightroom and use the Plugin Manager to install LR/Mogrify 2 …

[I selected the wrong plugin, but you get it, right?]

Then, you go to File — Export and you will see this …

Make sure you have “graphical watermarks” selected [the “mogrify configuration” will automatically be selected when you do that] and then scroll down until you see where you upload your watermark. Then, you can play around with the horizontal and vertical insets until you figure out where you want the watermark to go.

Personal note: I set all of my exported images to 700px on the longest side. That’s how wide the images are on my blog, and that way, if someone does steal them to print, then they won’t look very good.

I also save all of the export steps (image resize, where it’s going to be saved, graphical watermark, etc.) as “User Presets” … that has also been a huge timesaver.

Basically, when I am exporting a picture of Lucy, I have a “lucy with watermark” preset that I apply – it automatically tells Lightroom to save it to my special lucy folder, resize it to 700px on the longest side, and add my watermark. All with one click.

I have one called “tilt shift” which tells LR to resize and send it to TiltShift.

You can see another user preset up there called “christmas 2010” … it just resized and sent all of my Christmas pictures to my Christmas 2010 folder.

Anyway, by saving user presets, I don’t have to go through and change the settings every time I export an image or a group of images. Future tutorial? Yay or nay?

But back to this tutorial … the placement of your watermark via LR leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s a fun game to play around and see where it lands once you’ve exported it.

After rereading, I’m going to be honest … my tired and fuzzy momma brain just doesn’t work like it used to for writing tutorials, so if this didn’t make sense or I left something out or if you are sitting there scratching your head in bewilderment, PLEASE drop me a comment, and I’ll try to make it more clear.

I’ve never taken a class or read a book about Photoshop.

I do watch YouTube videos of PS tutorials and also read blogs and online tutorials.

But I’ve never upgraded past Photoshop Elements 5.0.

In other words, you don’t necessarily need professional quality programs to have a professional looking image.

But here’s my disclaimer: if you’re looking to become a professional photographer, a basic knowledge of GOOD editing programs is a must. And I firmly believe in hiring a professional to work up some branding & logos for you, unless you’re really good at that sort of thing.

ANYWAY … if you’re looking for a basic way to protect your images, then this is the tutorial for you.

Creating and Saving a Photoshop Brush Watermark

I discussed creating a watermark here, but I’m going to go ahead and go over that again with the addition of saving it to have everything in one neat and tidy tutorial.

Also, I have since changed my watermark, because I, personally, felt weird having the word “photography” included when I’m not a professional photographer. Just personal preference there.

Step 1: create new file (I started with 800px X 800px just to make sure I’d have a nice big file)

Step 2: type whatever you want (all brushes are created grayscale, so use black #000000)

Step 3: whenever you have the text or image or text & image combo that you want, do a fairly tight crop

Step 4: go to “select all” (or type CTRL-A), then go to “edit – define brush from selection”

Step 5: name your brush

At this very second, you can use it as a brush, but it’s currently hanging out in limbo in the brush category where you created it. If you want a special “watermark” folder for this brush, you need to go ahead and save it before you lose it.

Step 6: go to the brush drop-down menu and click on the >> and then select “preset manager”

Step 7: select the brush that you want to save (if you have more than one brush that you would like to use as a watermark [like I do], then select all of those brushes and click “save set”)

Step 8: name the set whatever you want – I super creatively named mine “watermarks.abr”

note: the folder will be located under C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 5.0\Presets\Brushes (or whatever program you have)

Step 9: click on “done”

Step 10: use your new brush / watermark!

Now, a couple of things to mention …

• Even though you created your watermark using black #000000, you can change it to whatever color you would like once you are finished. After you select the brush you want to use, just set the foreground color to whatever you would like before you “brush” it onto the image.

• You can change the size and opacity of the brush to suit your needs, but you need to do that before you “brush” the watermark onto the image. Once you “brush” it, you can’t change anything. You may have to “undo” a couple of times to get it right, but I usually aim for opacity around 20-30% depending on the image.

• The fonts I used in this brush are the ever popular Fonts for Peas found at Kevin and Amanda Fonts – the text is “Pea Frankie” and the heart is “Pea Bethany’s Doodles.” Please follow the rules when it comes to using free fonts you find online.

So I’ve gotten a lot of positive responses here and on Flickr about my new watermark.

I use watermarks solely to protect my images since I’ve found them on other blogs and websites before. If I ever do decide to become a professional photographer, I’ll probably have a professional logo worked up by a professional, but for now, this one does the trick.

The first thing I did was try to think about something I like … and dandelions came to mind. Okay, I hate that we have 748 of these weeds in our yard rather than beautiful green grass, but I love photographing them, and Emma loves picking and blowing them. And I really do think they’re pretty.

So I decided to find a Photoshop dandelion brush. Brush? What’s that?

Brushes are just that – a sort of digital paintbrush that you can use to create different effects. You can use a paint splatter brush to “brush” a paint splatter on an image using your Photoshop brush tool.

I don’t really know if that explains it very well, but if you keep reading the tutorial, I think it will make sense by the end.

Anyway, a quick Google search was all it took to find a great dandelion brush. I just downloaded the brush set and then installed it into Photoshop Elements 5.0 (I know, it’s ancient, but it works for my needs) using these instructions.

How to Install Custom Brushes

 

Windows: Place the *.abr files into:
Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements X\Presets\Brushes where X is the version number for your version of Photoshop Elements.

Mac: Place the *.abr files into:
Applications/Adobe Photoshop Elements 6/Presets/Brushes

Brushes created in Photoshop 7 or later will not work in Photoshop Elements 2 and earlier. Any Photoshop brushes should work in Photoshop Elements 3 and later.

I had to restart Photoshop once they were installed.

Now, I could have created a transparent image that I can just drag onto each photo I want to watermark to make things about eight thousand times easier, but for the sake of this tutorial, I’m just going to show you how to put the watermark directly onto your photo.

Step 1: Open image in Photoshop

Step 2: Select the brush tool

It may look different in the various versions of Photoshop, but it should look like a paintbrush.

Step 3: Select the brush set that holds the brush you want to use – in my case, the set is called “flower brushes”

Step 4: Select the brush you want to use – in my case, it’s “17” or the dandelion brush

Step 5: Change brush size to suit your needs. You can also change the opacity of the brush if you need to. I left this step out because my dandelion brush is very light already, but if you’re using a heavier brush image, then you might want to make the opacity lighter so it doesn’t take away from your photo.

Step 6: Move brush to wherever you want to stamp it and then click your mouse just once. You won’t be able to “move” it once you stamp it, so make sure you put it in just the right spot the first time (or you can undo and redo it, of course).

Step 7: Once you have it brushed in just the right spot, then you can add your text around it.

Step 8: Change opacity of text, if necessary.

And you’re done!

The great thing about Photoshop brushes is that you can use them for LOTS of things. I used 2 cute little bee brushes to create my header image, and then I used a bee brush and a bird brush to create my RSS feed and Twitter buttons.

If you use brushes that you’ve found online, please use good etiquette in giving credit. (I put the link to the website where I got my blog header and button brushes in my footer.) Most brush creators don’t require you to give credit, but it’s always nice, IMO.

My favorite place to find free Photoshop brushes is Brusheezy, but you can usually find any brush your heart desires by doing a quick Google search.

Well, I’ve got an allergy-ridden sick kiddo today, so I’m going to be offline for a while. Let me know via comment or email if you have any questions about using brushes, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

I got a few comments about the PSE part of the last tutorial, so I’m happy to go over that in a little more detail.

I noticed you like using Fill layers (like the navy here & grey in another post or pic I saw you do…at least I think it was you, heehee!). Anyway, how do you determine what color to use? And if you’re using it in Exclusion mode…does that mean you’re excluding the navy blue color from the picture or what?

Okay, I’ll be honest with you – I learned about navy blue exclusion on accident one day, and simply put, it brings an automatic vintage tone to the image.

After researching, I found out how it works. It is rather confusing, but I’ll try to explain it anyway.

Exclusion blending mode inverts lower layers according to the brightness values in the active layer. White inverts the composite pixels absolutely, black inverts them not at all, and the other brightness values invert them to some degree in between.

First, let’s talk about inverting colors – basically, that just means that white would turn black. And all other colors would turn into the invert [opposite] color.

Let’s use this rainbow as an example.

Now, using the definition above, we want to see the absolute invert of each color, so I’ll add a new fill layer in white and put it into exclusion blending mode to see what happens.

This will also explain how I add fill layers & change the blending modes.

step 1: add new solid color fill layer

step 2: click on “ok”

step 3: choose color (for our example of how exclusion blending works, I’m choosing white)

step 4: put the white fill layer into exclusion blending mode

And this is what happens to the rainbow!

As you can see, each color is totally inverted. I may research and see what the invert of each color is … you know, in all of my spare time. *wink wink*

Now, if we did a black fill layer, nothing would change.

And if we do a navy blue fill color and put it into exclusion blending mode, you can see that the colors are just barely inverted. They kind of look desaturated, but you can see that the white is already starting to get a little darker.

So, when you are choosing your fill layers for exclusion blending mode, you want to stay as dark as possible – if you choose a light yellow or lavendar or something like that, your colors are going to become more and more inverted.

As for how I decide which colors to use and which blending mode to use, it’s a total guessing game. I almost always use the navy blue in exclusion blending mode, because I love the tone it puts on my images. After that, I just play around with colors. Once you start using fill layers, you’ll figure out what looks good and what doesn’t.

I hope that helps explain a little more about how fill layers work on your images. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

And subscribe to my feed or receive emails with each new post to be the first to know about new tutorials!

I know this post is WAY overdue, but I had most of it written out last night when I went to bed, and then my computer updated and rebooted while I was sleeping.

Note to self: always save drafts.

straight out of the camera (sooc)

First thing I did was apply one of my own Lightroom presets called “vintage purple”

My presets aren’t really for sale or give-a-way (maybe one day) but this basically boosted the exposure, added some clarity & vibrance, took away a bit of saturation, and then I used split tones in tan (highlights) & purple (shadows).

Clearly, that made it too bright, so I wanted to work on that a little bit.

I took down the exposure all the way back down to 0 and increased the blacks to 16.

I also jacked up the highlight recovery to do away with the crazy overexposure around the top right corner of the camera.

My shadow saturation (the purple) was actually a little too purple’y, so I took it down quite a bit to make it more of a lavender.

Then, I bumped up the contrast even more.

And cropped it.

Imported that image into Photoshop Elements 5.0 so I could fix it up a little more and add a fun texture.

I immediately added a fill layer of navy blue #0f0f3d and put it into exclusion mode and changed opacity to 80%.

Added another fill layer of pure white #ffffff and changed the opacity to 5%.

Added this texture in overlay mode and changed opacity to 70% and then erased it over the camera (eraser set at 35% opacity).

Then, I copied the background (control-J) and moved that to the top of the layers and set it to soft light blending mode at 80% opacity.

Flattened the layers and TA-DA!

If you have any questions about this tutorial, please post them in the comments and I will reply there. I hope you enjoyed it!

Please add my feed to your rss reader if you are interested in seeing more tutorials like this.

I did a quick and dirty texture post last week, and it covers the basic BASIC ways to use textures. But if you want to use them on portraits, there are a few additional steps you want to keep in mind so the texture doesn’t go over the skin and look weird.

No doubt, there are times when textures look fine over skin, but I personally prefer to erase the texture over the skin.

For the sake of time and space, I’ll go through the first few steps w/o screenshots, because they are the same as in the original texture post.

I’m going to start with this image …

This one is special to me because she is running to see her daddy who just got home from work. And I *adore* the light. While it was shot using a wide open aperture, the house in the background is still not obscured enough for me, so I’m going to use a texture to really bring her out of the background.

1. download picture & process as desired (I do all of this in Lightroom)

2. import picture into Photoshop (I use Elements 5.0)

3. import texture, re-size and drag it over the image

4. choose blending mode of your choice (I almost always use either overlay or soft light)

5. change opacity to whatever you desire

I used Florabella Textures – Reverie b&w in Overlay mode @ 100% opacity

Now is when it becomes a little different for portraits. As you can see above, the texture makes Emma’s dress and pants look a little dirty, so I want to erase the texture over her.

There are various ways of doing this, including using the magnetic lasso tool to go around the subject and then erasing the texture that way. But I am really bad at using the lasso tool (shaky hand syndrome, lol), so I just erase freehand.

6. while you have the texture layer selected (it is very important that you have only the texture layer selected!), then select your eraser

7. make sure that you have the soft mechanical brush selected – the hard brush will leave a very obvious mark where you erase whereas the soft brush will make your erasing blend in

side note: you can use whatever size eraser brush that works best for the photo that you are working on – if you need to adjust the size as you are working, the “{“ and “}” keys make it smaller or larger (I just learned this shortcut a while ago and use it CONSTANTLY!)

8. change the opacity of the eraser to suit your needs – for this image, I used 88% but I normally use around 30% and go back over it where needed. depending on the photo and the texture, if you use 100% opacity to erase the texture, it may look a little weird. just play around with that until you find what works for you.

9. then, start erasing over the part that you do not want texturized! again, make sure you only have the texture layer selected – you are erasing the texture, NOT the image!

10. once you are satisfied with it, flatten the image and save it out. or add another texture, if you so desire. and then pat yourself on the back – you’re done!

A couple of points …

a. once you have erased over the part of the photo you don’t want texturized, keep the texture layer selected and then play around with the blending modes – it’s fun to see the different things you can do with whatever textured area remains!

b. I almost always use black and white textures for my portraits because they don’t change the overall color tone of the image, and then I use the fun colored ones for my landscapes or other images. If you find a texture that you would love to use for a portrait, but it’s green or brown or some other color that just doesn’t work for the image, convert the texture to black and white first. You’ll still have the awesome texture, but it won’t mess with the color of your photo.

c. obviously, this technique isn’t reserved for portraits only – I’ve used this technique for a coffee cup, a flower, etc. the sole purpose of this technique is to add a texture without covering the subject matter.

Please post a comment here or email me if you have any questions. I don’t consider myself a texture guru or anything, so please feel free to add a comment with your suggestions or tips or tricks.

Confession time!! It seems like I confess a lot of my photographic shortcomings on this blog, so I will probably NEVER make it as a professional photographer … but here comes another confession.

I started using textures because my camera has horrible horrible horrible noise control. Anytime I put my camera over ISO 200, I have noise.

Bad noise.

Lots of noise.

Noisy noise.

So when I discovered textures, I did a jig simply because it covers the noise!! But then textures can also completely change an image. It can change an image’s meaning and tone. It can make something happy become very dreary. It can turn a blurry image into something artistic.

And here’s my very non-professional tutorial on adding textures to images using Adobe Photoshop Elements. I’m currently using 5.0 because I just don’t have the extra money to upgrade to the latest version, so if I can do it in 5.0, anyone can do it!

I’m going to skip the processing, because it doesn’t really matter how you process an image in order to use textures. In that case, I’ll start with an image that I’ve already processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

I am going to use some of my recent favorite textures by Patti Brown / Kaleidoscope to demonstrate, but I’ll add a list of some of my favorite places for free textures at the end of this post. The pro to buying textures is that you are getting the original image, so you will always have it. I find myself using a texture I found online and then not remembering where I got it — the textures that I buy are always there. And easier to look through.

1. Open the image in Photoshop.

2. Open the textures that you want to use … in this case, I am using the following Patti Brown textures:
1. Vintage Dream Burst – Dream Collection
2. Vintage Dream Sequence III – Dream Collection
3. Dustclouds – The Gallery Collection
4. Seafoam Vignette – The Gallery Collection

The following steps are completely open to interpretation. What I do is solely based on how it looks, and it will look completely different on another image. The fun part of textures is the playing around to find something that looks good.

3. Simply drag the first layer you want to use onto the image.

I actually don’t like drag-sizing the texture to fit the image, so I re-size the textures based on the size of the image, and I always go over by about 10px. Simply put, if my original image is 800px x 600px, then I’ll resize the texture to 810px x 610px before I drag it onto the original image.

4. Change the “blending mode” for the layer – I usually use either “overlay” or “soft light” as my two main blending modes.

5. Then, change the “opacity” to suit your desires. Sometimes, you can leave it at 100%; sometimes, you may only need it around 20% – it’s all about personal preference here.

6. Rinse and repeat for the rest of your layers.

I used the following combinations:

1. Vintage Dream Burst – overlay @ 80%
2. Vintage Dream Sequence III – overlay @ 50%
3. Dustclouds – overlay @ 40%
4. Seafoam Vignette – soft light @ 70%

Once you get all of your layers on there, you can go back and change the blending mode and opacity for each layer to create different looks.

Just go to your layer control box, select the texture you want to change, and then make your adjustments. It’s fun to play around.

You can also “hide” each texture to see how the image looks with or without that texture. Just click on the “eye” next to the texture in the layer control box.

When you’re all done with your layers and happy with how they look, then you can “flatten image” and save it out.

There is a whole different method for using layers on portraits, so I’ll cover that in a different post. It involves a lot of erasing the texture over the skin since you usually don’t want someone’s face looking bumpy or scratchy.

I’ve already sang the praises of Patti Brown’s textures, and I really love Florabella textures as well, but here are just a few of my favorite places for free textures.

Flickr
Les Brumes
Pareeerica

Web
Grunge Textures
Deviantart

Enter to win a set of Patti’s amazing textures at I Heart Faces!!

I’ve had many people ask me to share my processing techniques for my images. Funny thing is, I don’t really do the same thing every time, and most of the time, I just play until it looks good. So it’s hard to just say, “Well, I did this and this and this.” But for you … I will try. ;)

Note: I process all of my images in Lightroom and Photoshop Elements 5.0

So we’re going to start with this image …

I know what you’re thinking. Um, dude? That’s blurry. Well, yes. I decided to use a particularly bad image to show you how drastic just a few changes can be. But I actually like the movement in this picture since she’s running around so carefree. I think it adds to the image.

It really does work. You’ll see. (Don’t go scrolling down to see, yet — be patient!)

We also have that horrible blownout light across the top of the image, and it’s just not composed very well AT ALL.

I’ve been a little obsessed with square crops lately, so I did that, purposefully keeping Jessie in the shot, because our dogs rarely get camera time these days, poor things.

Then, I just applied my “in shades of brown” preset.

Without just giving away my “formula” this preset basically warms up the image, adds a little green tint, bumps up the exposure, bumps down the saturation, and then split tones it with some tan highlights and light purple shadows. Among other things.

But. It still isn’t “right.” It looks like it’s just blurry, ya know?

So this is where textures come into play. I love textures. I love how they can totally add a completely different element to an image. It’s a whole other layer, both literally and figuratively.

On this image, I stuck with Florabella Textures, which were recently featured on I ♥ Faces. She has done some amazing things with these textures, and I can almost guarantee I’ll find the texture(s) I want when I open up my Florabella folder.

I used …
antique square in overlay mode @ 100%
champagne square in soft light mode @ 100%

I also copied the background image and put it into multiply mode @ 50% because the 2 textures had lightened it up significantly.

And then I added the creamy white border to add an even more vintage flair, kind of like those old polaroids.

After all the textures are added, and the image meets my approval, I just go to layer -> flatten image, then select -> all.

Image -> Resize -> Canvas Size

With these settings …

By the way, this is also a great way to add a black border without cutting into your image.

And here is the final product …

It’s amazing how much difference a little crop & texture can do to an image!

And here you all thought I was a decent photographer. ;)

You’ll notice in a lot of my pictures that I use rounded corners — I love the retro feel and uniqueness.

Uniqueness … is that a word? I’m not getting a spell-check notice, so I guess it is. Cool.

Anyway, I have a few people ask me how to get rounded corners, so I’m going to give you three ways to put rounded corners on your pictures.

The first way is the easiest … Picnik. It’s a {mostly} free online photo editing program — I say {mostly} because you can do a whole WHOLE lot for free. Or you can pay a small fee to have even more editing options. But the rounded corners option is free …

Anyway, it’s listed under the “Create” tab as a “Frame.” You can adjust the radius to make it either a little rounded or a LOT rounded.

The second way is also quite easy if you have Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Just go to the “Develop” section, and then to “Vignettes — Post-Crop”

amount: +100
midpoint: 50
roundness: -90 (you can adjust this number to make it less or more rounded)
feather: 0

If you are putting the image on a black background (like a photo blog?) then just set the “amount” to -100.

And finally, this is how I do it in Adobe Photoshop Elements. Now, I don’t have Photoshop CS because I chose to purchase Lightroom instead. I honestly don’t know if it’s the same in Photoshop CS, but I’m sure it’s close enough.

step 1: open your image …

step 2: choose the “rounded rectangle tool” under shapes

step 3: set the radius to 90px

You can change that number to make it more or less rounded – I almost always use from 90px to around 94px.

step 4: draw the rounded rectangle around the entire image

It doesn’t matter what color the rectangle is, because you’re going to fix that in the next step

step 5: set opacity to 0%

step 6: while still having the “rounded rectangle tool” selected, right click on the image and select “make selection”

step 7: make sure you have “feather radius” set to 0px and check “anti-aliased”

step 8: go to “edit” on the menu bar and select “copy merged”

step 9: go to “file” and select “new -> image from clipboard”

step 10: save it and you’re done!

Now. Go have fun making rounded corners!! I love taking pictures and applying vintage’y presets or actions and then using the rounded corners … it takes me back to my childhood pictures.

images are not here due to a url change a while ago … will try to get these re-uploaded soon!

A week or so ago, Sarah asked me how I got this picture of Emma to look like that, so I thought I’d walk through a typical “photo editing” process for me.

Let me preface by saying that I am not very good at it. I am still learning every day. I am constantly Google’ing “blahblahblah tutorial” for whatever I’m trying to do. I read articles and books, and I still don’t “get it” most of the time. I am most definitely NOT a professional by any means. I just really enjoy taking pictures, and out of the hundreds I take, sometimes I get a half-decent one. And thank goodness for Photoshop Elements and Picnik for making them look pretty good.

This probably won’t be a regular segment of my blog, because I really just play around more than anything, and I have no idea what is going to look good until I’m done with it. I truly have no idea what I’m doing.

For today’s lesson (hee) I’m going to use my picture from today’s Project365 – the theme is “Bokeh Wednesday” {in layman’s terms, bokeh is the blurry background of a picture} – so I went outside while E was napping and snapped this picture of my neighbor’s tree with their green shrub in the background to give it that green bokeh.

This is SOOC (straight out of the camera)

Not horrible, but not wonderful, either.

So I opened it up in Photoshop Elements and did the following …

1. Created new levels adjustment layer – I just moved the little slider around until I was happy with the results.

2. Duplicate background layer – and put into Screen mode. Change the opacity to 35%.

3. Duplicate background layer again. Drag the Tint Blue on top of the new layer (it’s under Photo Effects)

4. Put into Overlay mode – change the opacity to 75%

5. Flatten image and save.

Now, I went ahead and uploaded it like it is for my Project 365 – you can see it here.

But then I played with it in Picnik – I applied cross-processing (my favorite!) and then rounded corners.

Now, if you don’t have Photoshop, don’t sweat it. Ignore this entire post and head on over to Picnik — it is a great GREAT photo editing website, it’s easy and fun, and you can do SO many things to your pictures.

xo